Leading Up To
by sweet-and-simple
Summary: If they thought Tsuna was being difficult in taking up his role in the mafia, they apparently never met Iemitsu as a young adult.  Then again, they had never known him without Nana.


Tsuna wasn't the only one who didn't want to join the Vongola. As a matter of fact, compared to all in the past, he took a reasonably short time to accept his heritage.

Iemitsu was 22 years old when he finally accepted the mafia and his place in it.

…

"I'm doing this one favor for you and then I am going _home_, got that?" A cigarette burned between his chapped lips, amber eyes hard on the distance. One hand was braced near the cancer stick, the other holding a cell phone to his ear. "You will never call me again, _never_… bother me again, understood?"

A weathered, aged man was heard to chuckle on the other end, sadly and yet knowingly, perhaps with some sympathetic amusement. _"Understood, nephew. I know how much I am asking of you – "_

"No," he stopped the don, growling, "you don't." Without another word, he snapped the electronic shut and threw it on the floor, taking his cig out of his mouth and blowing a trail of smoke while he stomped on the communicator. The small device cracked and then died beneath his boot, blissfully so.

"Fuck this life," the young man snarled to no one in particular, dropping the cigarette to join the cell phone, "I'm going into construction." He might have meant it as a joke. He might not have.

Either way, he abandoned the alleyway corner and strode onto the sidewalk. One more life and then he could get on with his own.

_Finally_.

…

"Nana! Get the front tables, would you?" The middle-aged man eyeballed the teenager's backside, the girl standing before the dishes in the kitchen. "And be careful. If you break another dish, I'll be forced to take it out of your paycheck." His eyes burned.

The young woman blithely ignored the perverse stare. With practiced ease, she bit her tongue against mentioning that she had never broken a dish from this restaurant – that that had been one of the other girls and that she had only dropped it because she had been trembling out of fear of being groped by their employer. Again.

She didn't want to lose her job; she happened to love the people who dropped by, the food they served, how happy she could make the customers with her cooking… So she said nothing about the open staring and the discomfort crawling down her spine, instead humming an affirmative and wiping her hands off on her dark green apron. "I'll get right on it, boss."

In one smooth move, as practiced as her ignorance, she grabbed her platter and order sheets before slipping expertly by her boss, narrowly avoiding touching him and his pointedly jutting hips that would have put her in a far too awkward situation.

With a bounce in her step, she swept out into the front of her restaurant to the happy cries of regulars and relief of hungry folk. "Good afternoon, everybody!" There were seven people in all, six she knew by name, address, and family. She went through, greeting them and they greeted her in turn, people who knew people who knew everybody and she was that person.

She took three orders before getting to the seventh person, singing a merry tune beneath her breath till she paused at the man's table and lifted her eyes to his. "And what would you like, sir – " she flushed. Cupping her platter to her breast, she turned scarlet red in the face, auburn hair framing her crimson cheeks.

He had to be the most handsome man she had ever before seen.

He looked up from a book on the table, written in a language she wasn't sure of, and pinned her with amber eyes.

She swore there was a moment. Not _a_ moment, but _the_ moment, actually. _The_ moment that every romance novel in the world wrote about and tried to define correctly, except they were all right and wrong, everything they had said being true and yet so very dull compared to the truth.

She felt his stare like he was looking into the center of her, finding her innermost being and claiming her for his own, all without saying a word or moving an inch. The moment was so beautiful and breathless, she just stood there, a prey to it.

Her eyes were wide, but his were just as wide, rugged cheeks dusted with color as his book flapped noisily closed in the background, his hands suddenly limp in his lap.

She wasn't sure how long they were like that, finding each other and clinging to one another as if they had always been together, never been apart – eternity and forever and the beginning and the end theirs in one split second of eye contact.

And then somebody at one of the other tables laughed.

She jerked, tearing her eyes reluctantly from the stranger's to peer blankly at the order sheet. There was something she was supposed to say, something she was supposed to ask the man… but she would be hard pressed to remember what that was.

"So your name's Nana?" The blonde husked, still looking at her – pointedly her nametag. He was leaning out of his booth, closer to her, and his face, despite sitting down, was level with her torso.

"Mm hm!" The ability to speak seemed beyond her.

He grinned easily, as if he knew exactly what was wrong with her. "Iemitsu."

"H-huh?"

He patted his chest with a huge paw, skin bronzed and scars across his knuckles. "My name's Iemitsu."

She bowed formally. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Iemitsu!"

"It's a little more than that, isn't it?" The man purred, scooting closer until he was on the edge of his seat, turning his legs towards her and planting his feet wide apart as he crouched forward. He was looking at her in a completely wicked way. What a charmer! "Nana, I think I have something I need to ask you…" And then his eyes slid past her, all warmth and suave disappearing as he caught something behind her on his radar.

"What is it?" She tilted her head curiously, taking a step forward between his spread legs because she felt utterly comfortable there. For perfect strangers, there was nowhere else she would want to be then as close to him as she could possibly get.

He was glaring at something. At last, he turned back to her, looking up at her, and gave a weak smile that was still adoring and yet entirely fake. "What's the special for tonight?"

She felt first disappointment and then happiness. She wasn't sure what she had wanted him to ask, but at least he would get to try out her cooking! Mentally, she clenched a powerful fist and roared, all determination and fire, that it would be the _best_ cooking he would ever have! And, hopefully, not the last time he would have it.

She rambled off the goods and he decided on all of it (she squealed over his 'healthy' appetite). She twirled on her toes and pranced off to the kitchen, forgetting everyone else in the restaurant.

Behind the counter, at the cash register, her boss was looking unusually fidgety. She ignored that because, well, she had found her soulmate!

In the safety of her den of utensils and ingredients, she jumped up and down, hands curled to her mouth, and giggled like the girl she was.

Oh and he was so _handsome_… and his _eyes_ – oh my, his EYES! He was so rugged and buff! She wondered, with a giddy grin, how good he would feel against her. And then she shook her head, mostly because there was too much energy coercing throughout her body for her to stand still, to throw off the beautiful and _juicy_ yet unacceptable fantasies flying through her mind. What she would _give_ to see him without his shirt!

Yet she was positively certain that she wouldn't have to give much. More than likely, she would have to _take_ and there was absolutely _nothing_ wrong with that! Nope, not at _all_.

The door banged open and behind her stood her boss, fury in his face and eyes cruel. "You signaled him, didn't you?"

He was right in her face, erasing her happy mood as if it had never been. "Signaled…? Who?"

He took her upper arms in his hands and shoved her against the oven, ignoring her yelp of surprise and discomfort as he shook her with unnecessary force. "Don't play coy with me! You brought that mafia guy here somehow, didn't you? I'll _kill_ you before I let them get me!"

She stared up at him, completely at a loss. What _was_ he talking about?

He cursed and pushed her away. She tripped over her trembling legs and landed, painfully, against the corner of the cutting table, skull cracking against the edge of the wood a moment before her world disappeared. The last sound she thought she heard was a pained whimper, a sudden crack… and then silence.

…

"_Interesting, how ignorance brings no protection to the weak, isn't it?" _The same old man was murmuring into his ear, a different cell phone in hand, a bottle of strong alcohol in the other.

Iemitsu growled and hoped that the don got the message to _shut up_. Uncle or not, he had no respect for him, especially him being mafia.

"_I hear there was a tender moment between you and the girl that got hurt." _The man nonetheless went on, blithely ignoring the sour mood he _had_ to be feeling over the connection. _"I assume you're with her now?" _

"No." Yes. But he didn't have to know that. He didn't have to know that he was sitting right next to the teenager, the brunette stretched out on a hospital bed with her head wrapped in white adhesive tape. He was leaning forward, chin burrowed in the covers near her hand. He didn't even know her last name, her favorite color, where she lived, what she did aside from working at a restaurant run by a mafia fugitive… He didn't even know who she _was_… but he still somehow felt that he knew everything about her, like she had always been his to love, hold, and protect…

And that really pissed him off, especially with her breathing through a tube. She might even have a concussion. All because he had waited a moment too long before following his target into the kitchen, working on the side of subtle instead of desperation.

Instead of waiting for the other six guests to turn their attention elsewhere, he should have immediately rushed the kitchen, expecting the outlaw to freak and lash out. In the end, however, he had had his revenge. The man was dead and Nana was with him, his Nana.

Yes, _his_ Nana. He liked to think that he wouldn't have time to learn her last name before she was his legally.

"_Are you lying to me, nephew?" _The old man sung, all knowledge and no shit.

"No." Yes. But he didn't have to know that either.

"_Well, in case you happen to come across her again, give her my sincerest apologies. Oh, and, nephew?"_

"What?" He barked, already annoyed with the old fart.

"_I think there's a position open in the CEDEF, in case you want to protect what is precious to you."_

That was dirty. That was a low hit and they both knew it, one of them appalled by it and the other accepting. Iemitsu took a swig of his bottle and roughly scrubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "Fuck you, Timoteo." He threw his phone in the garbage can and then drowned it in a waterfall of tequila.

His words haunted him, though. He doubted Nana had opted to work under a mafia rapist. But she had been in the presence of one anyway.

Would he be able to protect her if he ignored his chance to be stronger? He could protect and love her, but if he took a position in the mafia… he could be her guardian angel, keep danger _hundreds_ of miles away from her instead of just as far away as the next house over.

Hours later, so many internal arguments later, Nana opened her eyes and Iemitsu found himself inanely proud to be the first person she saw.

"Hey," he greeted warmly, reluctantly grinning as she smiled in turn, radiant.

"Iemitsu…" she murmured, stretching and then wincing as she brought a hand up to her head. "Mmm, did I fall?" His grin dissipated slowly. "My head hurts and I'm in a hospital… did I slip and hit my head?"

He hoped, against all hope, that this meant what he thought it meant. "What do you remember before you…" he pondered a good word to say without saying 'got knocked out'.

"before I… went to the dark side?" She observed him with wide, trusting, innocent eyes, eyes full of young love. He just couldn't explain how they could be so close and be, well, all _conscious_ moments together, only minutes into a relationship. "I took your order and I walked into the kitchen… I was…" her cheeks painted red prettily and then she squealed into her hands, wiggling where she lied. That _had_ to hurt her head, but she didn't complain. "I was having dirty, dirty thoughts about you and me and – are you are yummy as you look?"

The blonde was ashamed to feel himself flush. He chalked it up to the concussion he had earlier been wishing she wouldn't have that she had just said that. Although… he had to admit, he was rather pleased with where her thoughts had turned and he would be an idiot to say he hadn't given her body a moment's thought between realizing that he was never going to have anyone but her and noticing his target behind the counter.

"We'll find out later." He winked and she giggled again. "So, what happened after your dirty, dirty thoughts?"

She blinked and then she rubbed her temple through the white wrappings. "I… don't know… I think I got so excited that I hurt myself…"

He would have wilted in relief had he thought it wouldn't be obvious.

"Did boss find me?"

And then the tension came back, twice as bad. He couldn't bring himself to tell her that her boss was dead, especially that he had been the one to kill him. It was time to change the subject. "No, I did…" He smirked wolfishly. "I forgot to ask you your number, so I snuck in and found you on the floor. I guess you hit your head off the corner of the counter…"

She nodded, buying that, and he almost felt bad for misleading her. "Do you want my number now or would it be easier to follow me home?"

He bowed his head to the bed, feeling extremely gifted. This was his kind of girl! "I'd like to follow you home."

Nana hummed happily and cupped one hand around his, so very tiny compared to him. She looked so frail and guileless…

Could he honestly include her in the mafia, even if it was all for her? _Especially_ with it all being for her? But, then again… would she have to know?

The thought was so naughty that he choked on it, earning a concerned look from his soulmate that he comforted with a smirk.

"So, Nana, _bambina_, tell me all about yourself." He raised her petite hand to his lips and kissed each knuckle, each peck earning a giggle from her. "Leave nothing out."

And, maybe, for her… he'd do anything.

_Author's Note: Nana and Iemitsu got stuck in my head… in actuality, I wanted to right about a soldier Iemitsu saving Nana's life, but then I thought about this and I liked it. And, yes, this is a straight pairing._

_Le gasp!_


End file.
